About inetnum "ownership"

Wed Mar 2 05:44:36 UTC 2016

On Tue, Mar 1, 2016 at 6:55 PM, Owen DeLong <owen at delong.com> wrote:
> Unique registrations in the RIR databases may well be property.

Hi Owen,

Registration records property. Registrations are not the property recorded.

The U.S. Supreme Court talks about property this way: "The right to
exclude others [is] one of the most essential sticks in the bundle of
rights that are commonly characterized as property." (Kaiser Aetna v.
United States)

Do I have the legal right to exclude others from announcing my block
of IP addresses to the public Internet routing tables? It's not well
tested in court but the odds are exceptionally strong that I do.
Indeed, the whole point of registration is to facilitate determination
of -who- has the exclusive right over -which- blocks of addresses.

The right to exclude is not the only one in the bundle of rights that
is property but it is the primary and it is argued sufficient
condition of property.
http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1492&context=nlr

Which brings us back around to what I said earlier: IP addresses are
property but the legal precedent isn't as strong as might be nice.

> IP addresses are so abstract and ephemeral in their nature
> as to be impossible to treat as property

Computers don't do abstraction. There's nothing abstract or
particularly ephemeral about the use of IP addresses on the public
Internet.

Regards,
Bill Herrin

-- 
William Herrin ................ herrin at dirtside.com  bill at herrin.us
Owner, Dirtside Systems ......... Web: <http://www.dirtside.com/>